“The normally unforthcoming executives at Apple have been praising a new book about Steve Jobs in recent days, using the opportunity to also diss Walter Isaacson’s three-and-a-half-year-old biography of their former boss as an unfair portrayal,” Peter Burrows writes for Bloomberg. “As if Steve Jobs needed defending.”
“So why the sudden push by Apple and its executives to criticize the Isaacson book while praising the latest biography, Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli? CEO Tim Cook is quoted in the book as saying that Isaacson ‘failed to capture the person,'” Burrows writes. “Senior Vice President Eddy Cue expressed the same sentiment via Twitter, as did design chief Jony Ive in a speech last year.”
“The PR offensive is ‘purely an emotional issue, not a business issue,’ says marketing consultant Regis McKenna, a longtime friend of Jobs who worked closely with him in the 1970s and early ’80s,” Burrows writes. “While Isaacson’s book was almost universally considered far more positive than negative, he understands why Cook, Cue, and Ive felt so strongly about it having fallen short of their expectations. Call it an artifact of the perfectionism Jobs demanded for Apple’s products, he says. The executives ‘all take it personally, because they are all a reflection of Steve,’ he says.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Isaacson hadn’t tried to pass himself off an an expert on CNBC, bloviating about what Apple should do or, even worse, proclaiming what Steve Jobs would or would not have done, we’d have been less vociferous regarding his boring, tedious, bland doorstop of a textbook.
Related articles:
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Apple execs, including Tim Cook, praise new Steve Jobs biography, and criticize an old one – March 23, 2015
Disney CEO Bob Iger kept Steve Jobs’s cancer a secret for three years – March 20, 2015
The evolution of Steve Jobs: It’s time to revisit — and correct — the myth – March 20, 2015
Apple CEO Cook blasts Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’ bio as a ‘just a rehash; a tremendous disservice’ – March 17, 2015
Steve Jobs: ‘I just don’t like television. Apple will never make a TV again’ – March 13, 2015
Tim Cook reportedly offered Steve Jobs his liver, but Jobs refused – March 12, 2015
Gruber: ‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ is a remarkable new book – March 3, 2015